The Colour Curtain : A Report on the Bandung Conference PDF
Preview The Colour Curtain : A Report on the Bandung Conference
THE COLOUR CURTAIN A REPORT ON THE BANDUNG CONFERENCE THE COLOUR CURTAIN A Report on the Bandung Conference By RICHARD WRIGHT Foreword by Gunnar Myrdal 9 LONDON DENNIS DOBSON FIRST PUBLISHED IN GREAT BRITAIN IN MGMLVI BY DOBSON BOOKS LTD., LONDON ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY BRISTOL TYPESETTING GO., STOKES CROFT, BRISTOL C O N T E N T S Foreword . . . . 7 I Bandung : Beyond Left and Right. 9 II Race and Religion at Bandung . 109 III Communism at Bandung . . 134 IV Racial Shame at Bandung . . 149 V The Western World at Bandung . 168 Illustrations . between pages 70 and 71 Foreword T his book does not pretend to be a heavily documented analysis of the Bandung Conference and of the forces of world history in the making which converged there. It is, rather, Richard Wright telling us what he, a visiting stranger and a good reporter, heard and saw there, and what he himself thought and felt. His interest was focused on the two powerful urges far beyond Left and Right which he found at work there : Religion and Race. These urges unite the peoples—keep them apart from, and against, the West—and at the same time divide them internally and in their mutual relations; they call to concerted action but tend also to frustrate such efforts. Religion is their cultural heritage from many thou sands of years of living and dying, longing and fearing, and it has moulded their institutions and loaded their valua tions. Race is the explosive pressure of their reaction to West European prejudice and discrimination, stored and accumulated under centuries of colonial domination. Asia and Africa thus carry the irrationalism of both East and West. In Richard Wright’s own individual development, from a childhood amongst the remnants of slavery to his present life as a free and lonely intellectual, lie the foundations for 7 F O R E W O R D 8 his absorbing interest in these matters and his deep and spontaneous understanding. The specific objectivity of his observations and inferences is determined by the clear definition of the very personal point from which he views things. As a writer—and this is his approach to greatness, giving distinction also to the collection of snapshots in the present volume—he is the scrupulously honest artist who gives himself fully, without any opportunistic reserves. Gunnar M yrdal Geneva, 18 September, 1955 I Bandung: Beyond Left and Right In order to spend Christmas with my family, I’d returned to Paris from a long, tiring trip in Spain where I’d been gathering material for a book. The holidays had passed, but, in one comer of the living room, sheltering a pile of children’s presents, the glittering pine tree was still up. It was evening; I was alone; and my mind drifted toward Andalusia where I had work to finish . . . Idly, I picked up the evening’s newspaper that lay folded near me upon a table and began thumbing through it. Then I was staring at a news item that baffled me. I bent forward and read the item a second time. Twenty-nine free and independent nations of Asia and Africa are meeting in Bandung, Indonesia, to discuss eracialism and colonialism3 . . . What is this ? I scanned the list of nations involved : China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Burma, Egypt, Turkey, the Philippines, Ethiopia, Gold Coast, etc. My God ! I began a rapid calculation of the populations of the nations listed and, when my total topped the 1,000,000,000 mark, I stopped, pulled off my glasses, and tried to think. A stream of reali zations claimed my mind : these people were ex-colonial subjects, people whom the white West called ‘coloured’ peoples . . . Almost all of the nations mentioned had been, in some form or other, under the domination of Western 9 Ï0 T H E C O L O U R C U R T A I N Europe; some had been subjected for a few decades and others had been ruled for three hundred and fifty years . . . And most of the leaders of these nations had been political prisoners, men who had lived lonely lives in exile, men to whom secret political activity had been a routine matter, men to whom sacrifice and suffering had been daily com panions . . . And the populations of almost all the nations listed were deeply religious. This was a meeting of almost all of the human race living in the main geopolitical centre of gravity of the earth. I tried to recall what I knew of their leaders and my memory dredged up : Ali Sastroamidjojo, Prime Minister of Indonesia : exile, prison, war . . . Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India : long years in prison . . . Kwame Nkrumah, Prime Minister of the Gold Coast : ex-political prisoner and gifted organizer of tribal masses . . . Chou En-lai, Premier of China : a disciplined Communist of the classical, Bolshevik mould, a product of war and conspiracy and revolution . . . Ho Chi Minh, Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam : soldier, staunch Bol shevik, sagacious and pitiless leader of guerrilla armies. . . . The despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed—in short, the underdogs of the human race were meeting. Here were class and racial and religious consciousness on a global scale. Who had thought of organizing such a meeting? And what had these nations in common ? Nothing, it seemed to me, but what their past relationship to the Western world had made them feel. This meeting of the rejected was in itself a kind of judgment upon that Western world ! I rose, walked the floor for a moment, then sat again and read the aims of the twenty-nine nation conference :
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